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I am indebted to Spell with Flickr for my fantabulous title typeface bar.
And a host of others for the wonderful faces that brings my Mood-O-Meter alive. A click on the picture will take you to the respective photo's source page.

Disclaimer

All views and opinions expressed on this blog are my own and not that of my employers, past or present.

October 19, 2007

I have always wondered why application and web 2.0 development on the mobile was not happening as quickly as that on the net. Given the fact that there are about 2.4 billion mobile phone users worldwide (a 150% increase between 2001 and 2006) compared to only about 747 million people online (grew about 10% from 2006 to 2007) it makes sense that more innovative killer social applications should be deployed on the mobile than the internet. [Source for above figures is Euromonitor] But this did not happen as the phones were not capable of it.

But that has been slowly changing and it seems like things are gaining momentum. The focus is shifting back to the mobile phone. Geo-tagged location-based social apps like Plazes, Jaiku, Twitter, Dopplr etc got people with mobile phones involved with the net in a useful, delightful, meaningful way. Suddenly as things progressed on the developer end(as it usually does in Silicon Valley and of late Helsinki, Finland) the phone address book seems to be the epicenter of gravity for all things socially networked. As is confirmed by the words of the father of Web 2.0 Tim O'Reilly himself:

There is a spate of big action happening among the big players. You can read about Nokia and Google's latest acquisitions here, here and here on Renny Gleeson's blog which is a fantastic place to follow the latest and greatest on all things interactive, digital and engaging. Then there is the latest acquisition of Jaiku by Google. iPhone is also in the action. All sorts of possibilities seem to be emerging for anybody with a good third generation handset. Rudy de Waele and Raimo Van der Klein has this fantastic slide which captures where things are headed:

The great part of the slide is it is done in the spirit of crowd sourced enhancement - you can go in and add input or changes to the slide and mail back to them.

The future looks more complex and disruptive than ever and more exciting (and uncertain) for us advertising folks. Or as Faris says 'The Future is Open'. It's really which way YOU interpret it. And Chris Messina interprets it thus here:

"If you think far enough into the future, and realize that the iPhone
is essentially the Sputnik of next generation of computing and
telephony, you’ll realize how important the development of presence
technology will be in light of the 2.0 Address Book.
Sure, the VoIP folks have known about this stuff forever, and CISCO
even has a few decent products built on it, but I’m not talking about
IP-routed phone calls. I’m talking about IP-routed people.
Believe it or not, this is where things have to go in order for Google
and Apple to continue their relentless drive towards ease-of-use and
clarity of design.

In the future, you will buy a cellphone-like device. It will have a
connection to the internet, no matter what. And it’ll probably be powered over the air.
The device will be tradeable with your friends and will retain no
solid-state memory. You literally could pick up a device on a park
bench, login with your OpenID
(IP-routed people, right?) from any number of service providers (though
the best ones will be provided by the credit card companies). Your user
data will live in the cloud and be delivered in bursts via myriad APIs
strung together and then authorized with OAuth
to accomplish specific tasks as they manifest. If you want to make a
phone call, you call up the function on the touch screen and it’s all
web-based, and looks and behaves natively. Your address book lives in
Google-land on some server, and not in the phone. You start typing
someone’s name and not only does it pull the latest photos of the first
five to ten people it matches, but it does so in a distributed fashion,
plucking the data from hcardsacross the web, grabbing both the most up-to-date contact information, the person’s hcalendar
availability and their presence. It’s basically an IM-style buddy list
for presence, and the data never grows old and never goes stale.
Instead of just seeing someone’s inert photo when you bring up their
record in your address book, you see all manner of social and presence
data. Hell, you might even get a picture of their current location.
This is the lowercase semantic web in action where the people who still
hold on to figments of their privacy will become increasingly marginalized through obfuscation and increasingly invisible to the network. I don’t have an answer for this or a moral judgement on it; it’s going to happen one way or another."

February 13, 2007

There are roughly 105 million homes with televisions in India, up from
88 million in 2000. The current number of television households is
about the same as in the United States, though for India that amounts
to only about half of the country’s households, compared with 98
percent in the United States.